Tuesday, 24 February 2015

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 represents an exciting next step in the
continued evolution of the product family and is perhaps the most
comprehensive update in the 11 years I’ve been with the company. New
tools such as systemd, firewalld, OpenLMI and others changes the
paradigm for enterprise Linux administration by providing greater
centralization and automation for the administrator. Other enhancements
improve performance, security and scalability. Red Hat Training has
substantially updated the RHCE level curriculum to integrate these
improvements. The technical changes in the new release are such that
even veteran, practicing Linux administrators should consider taking
additional training.

In addition to incorporating new technical features from Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 7, major releases provide an opportunity for Red Hat
Training to make structural changes to improve our curriculum. Over the
past two years we’ve surveyed our customers, partners and instructors
and have been looking forward to the opportunity to make these changes.
There are four enhancements I’d like to call out specifically.

1) Red Hat System Administration I (RH124) is the entry point to the
Linux curriculum and is the first 5 days of the nine day curriculum
leading to RHCSA certification. Based on customer feedback, we have
substantially increased the command line administration approaches in
the new course, diving right in on day one. In turn we will be retiring
the Red Hat Command Line Administration (RH190) course.

2) Following feedback from our certified professionals community, the
Red Hat System Administration III course (RH255) has been revised to
include several chapters on shell scripting. The course continues to
cover key network services such as Apache, DNS, iSCSI and also provides a
tech preview of the new container features in Docker.

3) Perhaps the change I’m most excited about is the new Red Hat
Certification Lab course (RH300) which replaces the flagship RHCE Rapid
Track Course which first ran 15 years ago. The reality is that as Linux
has become a true enterprise platform, the requirements to be a Red Hat
Certified Engineer have grown commensurately. Red Hat’s courses are
dense and its simply not possible to cover the thirteen days of content
in Red Hat System Administration I, II and III in four days.

The new Red Hat Certification Lab course seeks to meet the very
specific needs of students who have completed their training and desire
practice before taking the RHCE exam. Students will spend 80-90% of
their time “in labs”, complimented by a handful of lectures by an
instructor on key new functionality like systemd, firewalld and the new
boot process. Labs will be self-paced, with the instructor serving more
as a teaching assistant as students require assistance. Students will
have access to the full set of labs for both the RHCSA Rapid Track
course (RH200) and the Red Hat System Administration III (RH255),
providing comprehensive coverage for the competencies which are
presented in the RHCSA and RHCE exams.

4) Over the past four years live virtual training (VT) and self-paced
training have become primary delivery methods for our customers. To
address those needs, the updated course materials and labs were
redesigned to be completely inter-operable between different modalities,
ensuring our customers get the same learning experience. Our self-paced
training platform, Red Hat Online Learning (ROLE), is ready to deliver
the System Administation I & II courses and the RHCSA Rapid Track
globally via six Amazon EC2 data centers. The System Administration III
course and the RHCE Certification Lab will be available in coming weeks
as will translations of all five courses into eight other languages.